The transition towards making Gronlid Central School from a K to Grade 12 to a K to Grade 8 school has begun.
The North East School Division’s board of education talked about the process at its Dec. 20 meeting, focusing on bus routes and attendance areas.
Don Rempel, the division’s director of education, said the reduction in grades will allow the division to reduce the staff at the school by the equivalent of two full-time teachers.
“The rest: the transportation and the support staff, stays the same,” he said.
“If it was just about saving money, it would be easy,” said Luke Perkins, the division’s chair, “but it’s not.”
The chair said it’s also about ensuring a viable school with good programming for students.
Gronlid Central will become a feeder school to the Melfort and Unit Comprehensive Collegiate. That will mean there will be an explicit expectation, backed by policy, that will require students to go to Gronlid until Grade 9.
There will also be changes to the bus routes to allow high school students to go to Melfort, meaning bus routes could start 30 to 40 minutes earlier than they used to.
Rempel said the division and the Gronlid school community council are talking with parents, and that there’s still some flexibility in the future. There might be room to accommodate students whose parents’ job focus on a location other than Melfort.
“Since the world’s changed, we’re going to have to work with our parents,” he said. “So if a parent works and most of their trading area’s in Nipawin, but they’ve always been under the assumption that their kid could be in Gronlid, close to the family home, then I think we have to work with them.”
There’s also a possibility Gronlid Central’s boundaries will be expanded to add students living near the edges in the cases where the distance to Gronlid is about the same as their currently assigned school.
